The Ig Nobels are a thing of beauty and a joy forever, as this year’s prep for the upcoming Nobel Prize awards proves.

The Ig Nobels are a thing of beauty and a joy forever, as this year’s prep for the upcoming Nobel Prize awards proves.

Awarded Thursday in a splendid ceremony at Harvard University, the Igs aren’t bestowed on the junk science we read every day — female sleep apnea linked to lipstick ingestion, male pattern baldness to post-traumatic gym class disorder — or for research that is merely obscure. They are earned for achievement that makes people laugh, and then think.

Unlike the Nobels, where you can argue endlessly and fruitlessly, as I do every year, that the literature prize should not have gone to an overblown French angst novelist like J.-M.G. Le Clézio but to the dirt-voiced lyricist Tom Waits, the 2012 Igs are inarguable. They got that right, you think, when you read that the U.S. Government Accountability Office won for “issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports.”

This was obviously data meta-reporting at its best although the winning report’s fretful tone probably gave it an edge with the judges.

The scientists are good-humoured about their triumphs, accept the awards from the hands of actual Nobel laureates and make acceptance speeches kept to 60 seconds by an 8-year-old who starts shouting, “Please stop, I’m bored!” when they go over their limit. She’s a candid human replacement for the music that sloshes over chatty winners at the Oscars.

This year’s Ig Nobel in Acoustics went to two Japanese scientists who invented the best silencer of all, the SpeechJammer, a machine that shuts people up by making them hear their own words respoken a few hundred milliseconds later.

The Neuroscience Prize, casting doubt on that recent avalanche of studies on brain activity, was given to four U.S. researchers for proving that “brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon.”

The scientists showed the same social-perspective task to deceased fish as to human subjects and found post-mortem brain signals in the fish. “We argue that relying on standard statistical thresholds and low minimum cluster sizes is an ineffective control for multiple comparisons,” they concluded dryly, in a study reported in a journal covering “untapped knowledge in the computational and life sciences.”

Excitable neuroscientists would do well to dampen their initial ardour, as would publishers of books with “brain” in the title. It’s a brain bandwagon that the Ig Nobels, sponsored by Annals of Improbable Research magazine, may perhaps help slow down.

I strongly disagree with the awarding of the Physics prize to a joint British-American team for their study of the forces that bear on the human ponytail, the hairstyle whose ultimate version is colloquially known as the “Croydon facelift.”

I should have won that prize. There is nothing I don’t know about hair failure, whether by blow dryer, flatiron, rollers (hot and cold), anti-frizz, deep-conditioner, Velcro bands, elastics and Bump-Its. Their study was a big so-what, funded by Unilever which makes hair products so the bias is built-in.

Raymond Goldstein, a University of Cambridge scientist, and his fellows used special imaging on hair bundles — the same technique that got the salmon people into trouble — and concluded that hair has “intrinsic curvature” (they mean curls) and stiffness (intransigence), which, they posit, creates a spring effect that can be counteracted by an equally opposing spring.

This is obviously untrue as I have brought to bear any number of spring-like pressures on my hair and the thing will neither form nor retain a bouncy ponytail shape, merely hanging there with a limp effect that the prize-winners shied away from correcting, despite the fact that they could have shared a patent with Unilever and become very rich.

The scientists suggest their results could be helpful in designing home insulation or even portraying cartoon hair in animated movies. But the fact is, science has failed the ponytail and no wonder they won an Ig.

That is the only real blot on this year’s prizes. Everyone can agree that the Medicine prize for a French team that advised doctors on how to avoid explosions inside patients when using electrical cauterizing devices was well-earned.

The Peru/Russia/Netherlands study, “Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller,” will doubtless seem English-ist to some, as it suggests that people count from left to right in the same way that they read (untrue of some eastern cultures). People start with the little numbers, apparently, so they estimate height wrongly.

But admit it, when you go to Paris, it does look tiny.

Thus we confirm in science what we knew in our hearts, that people are foolish and draw vast conclusions from little evidence. Q.E.D.

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